The Pentagon Can't Account for $21 Trillion (That's Not a Typo)

Then-Secretary of Defense Robert
Gates during a 2008 visit to Kosovo with U.S. Army troops on foot patrol in the
town of Gnjilane. (The U.S. Army / CC BY 2.0)

Twenty-one
trillion dollars.

The
Pentagon’s own numbers show that it can’t account for $21 trillion. Yes, I mean
trillion with a “T.” And this could change everything.

But I’ll
get back to that in a moment.

There are
certain things the human mind is not meant to do. Our complex brains cannot
view the world in infrared, cannot spell words backward during orgasm and
cannot really grasp numbers over a few thousand. A few
thousand, we can feel and conceptualize. We’ve all been in stadiums with
several thousand people. We have an idea of what that looks like (and how
sticky the floor gets).

But when
we get into the millions, we lose it. It becomes a fog of nonsense. Visualizing
it feels like trying to hug a memory. We may know what $1 million can buy (and
we may want that thing), but you probably don’t know how tall a stack of a
million $1 bills is. You probably don’t know how long it takes a minimum-wage
employee to make $1 million.

That’s
why trying to understand—truly understand—that the Pentagon spent 21 trillion unaccounted-for
dollars between 1998 and 2015 washes over us like your mother telling you that
your third cousin you met twice is getting divorced. It seems vaguely
upsetting, but you forget about it 15 seconds later because … what else is
there to do?

Twenty-one
trillion.

But let’s
get back to the beginning. A couple of years ago, Mark Skidmore, an economics
professor, heard Catherine Austin Fitts, former assistant
secretary in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, say that the
Department of Defense Office of Inspector General had found $6.5 trillion worth of unaccounted-for spending in
2015. Skidmore, being an economics professor, thought something like, “She
means $6.5 billion. Not trillion. Because trillion would mean the Pentagon
couldn’t account for more money than the gross domestic product of the whole
United Kingdom. But still, $6.5 billion of unaccounted-for money is a crazy
amount.”

So he
went and looked at the inspector general’s report, and he found something
interesting: It was trillion! It was ******* $6.5 trillion
in 2015 of unaccounted-for spending! And I’m sorry for the cursing, but the
word “trillion” is legally obligated to be prefaced with “*******.” It is
indeed way more than the U.K.’s GDP.

Skidmore
did a little more digging. As Forbes reported in December 2017, “[He] and Catherine
Austin Fitts … conducted a search of government websites and found similar
reports dating back to 1998. While the documents are incomplete, original
government sources indicate $21 trillion in unsupported adjustments have been
reported for the Department of Defense and the Department of Housing and Urban
Development for the years 1998-2015.”

Let’s
stop and take a second to conceive how much $21 trillion is (which you can’t
because our brains short-circuit, but we’ll try anyway).

3.
Picture a stack of money. Now imagine that that stack of dollars is all $1,000
bills. Each bill says “$1,000” on it. How high do you imagine that stack of
dollars would be if it were $1 trillion. It would be 63 miles high.

4.
Imagine you make $40,000 a year. How long would it take you to make $1
trillion? Well, don’t sign up for this task, because it would take you 25 million years (which sounds
like a long time, but I hear that the last 10 million really fly by because you
already know your way around the office, where the coffee machine is, etc.).

The human
brain is not meant to think about a trillion dollars.

And it’s
definitely not meant to think about the $21 trillion our Department of Defense
can’t account for. These numbers sound bananas. They sound like something Alex
Jones found tattooed on his backside by extraterrestrials.

But the
21 trillion number comes from the Department of Defense Office of Inspector
General—the OIG. Although, as Forbes pointed out, “after Mark Skidmore began
inquiring about OIG-reported unsubstantiated adjustments, the OIG’s webpage,
which documented, albeit in a highly incomplete manner, these unsupported
“accounting adjustments,” was mysteriously taken down.”

Luckily,
people had already grabbed copies of the report, which—for now—you can view here.

Here’s
something else important from that Forbes article—which is one of the only
mainstream media articles you can find on the largest theft in American
history:

Given that
the entire Army budget in fiscal year 2015 was $120 billion, unsupported
adjustments were 54 times the level of spending authorized by Congress.

That’s
right. The expenses with no explanation were 54 times the
actual budget allotted by Congress. Well, it’s good to see Congress is doing
1/54th of its job of overseeing military spending (that’s actually more than I
thought Congress was doing). This would seem to mean that 98 percent of every
dollar spent by the Army in 2015 was unconstitutional.

So, pray
tell, what did the OIG say caused all this unaccounted-for spending that makes
Jeff Bezos’ net worth look like that of a guy jingling a tin can on the street
corner?

“[The
July 2016 inspector general] report indicates that unsupported adjustments are
the result of the Defense Department’s ‘failure to correct system
deficiencies.’ ”

They
blame trillions of dollars of mysterious spending on a
“failure to correct system deficiencies”? That’s like me saying I had sex with
100,000 wild hairless aardvarks because I wasn’t looking where I was walking.

Twenty-one
trillion.

Say it
slowly to yourself.

At the
end of the day, there are no justifiable explanations for this amount of
unaccounted-for, unconstitutional spending. Right now, the Pentagon is being audited for the first
time ever, and it’s taking 2,400 auditors to do it. I’m not holding my breath
that they’ll actually be allowed to get to the bottom of this.

But if
the American people truly understood this number, it would change both the
country and the world. It means that the dollar is sprinting down a path toward
worthless. If the Pentagon is hiding spending that dwarfs the amount of tax
dollars coming in to the federal government, then it’s clear the government is
printing however much it wants and thinking there are no consequences. Once
these trillions are considered, our fiat currency has even less meaning than it
already does, and it’s only a matter of time before inflation runs wild.

It also
means that any time our government says it “doesn’t have money” for a project,
it’s laughable. It can clearly “create” as much as it wants for bombing and
death. This would explain how Donald Trump’s military can drop well over 100 bombs a day that cost well north of
$1 million each.

So why
can’t our government also “create” endless money for health care, education,
the homeless, veterans benefits and the elderly, to make all parking free and
to pay the Rolling Stones to play stoop-front shows in my neighborhood? (I’m
sure the Rolling Stones are expensive, but surely a trillion dollars could
cover a couple of songs.)

Obviously,
our government could do those things, but it chooses not to. Earlier this
month, Louisiana sent eviction notices to 30,000 elderly peopleon
Medicaid to kick them out of their nursing homes. Yes, a country that can vomit
trillions of dollars down a black hole marked “Military” can’t find the money
to take care of our poor elderly. It’s a repulsive joke.

Twenty-one
trillion.

Former
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates spoke about how no one knows where the money
is flying in the Pentagon. In a barely reported speech in 2011,
he said, “My staff and I learned that it was nearly impossible to get accurate
information and answers to questions such as, ‘How much money did you spend?’
and ‘How many people do you have?’ ”

They
can’t even find out how many people work for a specific department?

Note for
anyone looking for a job: Just show up at the Pentagon and tell them you work
there. It doesn’t seem like they’d have much luck proving you don’t.

For more
on this story, check out David DeGraw’s excellent reporting at ChangeMaker.media,
because the mainstream corporate media are mouthpieces for the weapons
industry. They are friends with benefits of the military-industrial complex. I
have seen basically nothing from the mainstream corporate media concerning this
mysterious $21 trillion. I missed the time when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer said that
the money we dump into war and death—either the accounted-for money or the
secretive trillions—could end world hunger and poverty many times over. There’s no reason anybody
needs to be starving or hungry or unsheltered on this planet, but our
government seems hellbent on proving that it stands for nothing but profiting
off death and misery. And our media desperately want to show they stand for
nothing but propping up our morally bankrupt empire.

When the
media aren’t actively promoting war, they’re filling the airwaves with ****, so
the entire country can’t even hear itself think. Our whole mindscape is filled
to the brim with nonsense and vacant celebrity idiocy. Then, while no one is
looking, the largest theft humankind has ever seen is going on behind our
backs—covered up under the guise of “national security.”

Twenty-one
trillion.

Don’t
forget.

If you
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weekly TV show, “Redacted Tonight.” Camp also is touring cities
throughout the U.S. with his live comedy show. Check out his schedule here.

"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs